Owning my demons

Gossamer threads of life

Disclaimer: Please don’t read this if you find suicidal ideation triggering.

Someone I loosely “know” from professional circles asked me how I was the other day, “are you all right?”  I was touched by the question.  We expect our nearest and dearest to show up for us, or maybe not, but when others do, it hits harder.

I struggle to need people.  Maybe it is from fear.  I have come dangerously close to not showing up for myself.  My therapist says that people who slip through the net of life do so because they lose the will to grow.

The kind words from a clutch of you who read this blog and have done so faithfully for a long time move and sustain me.  I haven’t posted much lately, and I hate when others write and say that they have been so busy, blah, blah, blah.

What’s going on in my life.  I am divorced.  For real.  I have been challenging the terms of the implementation and have been royally screwed.  The silver lining in imminent homelessness and debt and an inability to support my children or even myself is to be forced to confront the victim mindset.  Self-pity is a false God.

I don’t love revenge fantasies, even though my anger is so great that staying in the lane of the white witch often becomes a challenge for me, as the darkness is a temptation.  I have resisted so far.

My therapist and I have switched over to a 24/7 on-call relationship.  My den mother is not someone I can turn to with the blackness inside as she lost two of her closest to suicide.

My dharma is to write.  A very small number of you have been invited across the threshold to another, more polished version of me.  It exists on Medium and Substack and on a blog.  If I know you well enough and trust that you will guard my secrets, and are curious to read what else write, then please dm me or comment with contact details and I will share that info with you privately.

I am swimming in writing at the moment, not the actual work of writing, but an overload of ideas and a hunger to finish them.  The importance of this is about life itself.  It is the most powerful keeping me alive.  This burning, egotistical need to tell stories.

What’s in the queue, and in no particular order:

• About 30 cookbooks which have been written but are not published
• A book about how to raise children who love food
• A book on diet, nutrition and health
• An illustrated anthology of erotica
• A femdom trilogy which is living womanism
• The diary of my transition
• A book of love from a submissive perspective
• And four blogs: this one, my sex work blog, my therapeutic practice blog, and my feminist blog

That’s what I can remember.

I am living through a house move, where I am walking from the villa which was our former family home and which the children and I have lived in for over a decade.  I am undertaking a move, largely on my own as my kids have not been quite as engaged as I anticipated.  It is stressful and whenever I hit my head on a ceiling or something else, stub my toe, or hurt myself I feel that I am being taught a lesson and end up crying until I can work again.

Perhaps in the spirit of staying alive, I went on a tantric retreat.  It was rough.  As I dig deeper into this path, what it asks of me becomes greater.  4 days of ego death followed by 3 days of prayer and meditation all conducted in silence, including touching each other, coupled with no caffeine, one meal a day, and being completely in ourselves.  It was my edge.  I stared into the abyss.

My tears were shed in silence, on my own.  But it was the others who lived the same journey with me, who kept me safe.  And the horses.  And running.  If you have read me for a while, you know how important running is for my mental health.  Running is somatic release for me.  And there was a point during the retreat where in front of everyone, the leader dismantled my ego in a blunt way.  It was a case of tough love.  

He acknowledged in front of everyone that trans people are society’s most likely to unalive themselves.  Hearing it said, cracked me open.  He said as I walked back to my place to give someone else a turn, “its 50:50 whether you do the work; 50:50 whether you make it; maybe it will be harder for you than anyone here.”  I waved my arms as if to say, “yes, I may do this, or I may crawl back inside my ego and let it keep me alive as it has for my whole life.”

I was existing in a state existential numbness.  The shit hit the fan for me when we shift gears from ego work to prayer.  On the first evening, we had an orgy.

And while I can contemplate the beauty and loved the connection, I was not in my body, and ended up walking away from the tangle of sex and eroticism just before 2 am…when others stayed until dawn.  That is when I began to break.

Its funny how some things once realised become obvious, but somehow we manage to keep ourselves from them. When we first sat down in mini-groups on the very first evening, we spent 3 minutes each talking about the ego and how it protected us.  Only two of us cried.  I went last.  And what I found was that I was even unable to speak.  To finish my sentences.  When you choke on your own words, on your breath, and just tremble, it should have been obvious before it happened.  But no, my sense of burial of those things long hidden is so powerful that I didn’t; know it was there.

It took 10 days of sharing for it to finally come out.

The death of my ego began (and its not dead yet) when it was put on trial by my peers.  The words they spoke to me were provided to them by 10 of my closest friends and family.  The love that I felt from them was in every tough message.  At the end I thought, ‘well, I knew that already.  And I do it anyway.’ I told my team, “you guys let me off easy.” But what stayed with me following the intervention of the retreat leader was that understanding the root cause was only the first step to processing the feedback…what was required was to understand how those circumstances manifested in my life.

The final three days were sexual.  We were allowed to talk and connect.  Be intimate.  Touch each other.  And it may seem strange, but this was the part that was most difficult of all.  The part which sparked the most fear.

On the day, I was able to put to words this of distress upon which I have floated for my entire life.  My mother sexualised me.  She molested me when I was a baby.  It may have begun from birth, but memory is not sufficient.  Glimpses are coming to me, images, feelings.  What I remember feeling most is that she wasn’t safe.  That it was wrong.  It’s a body feeling.  It doesn’t really have words.

My ego has forgiven her.  My lived experience has been to blame myself.  The fundamental core of me is terrified of being sexual, of all things sexual. My infantilist side is a toxic fetish created to appease her.  To crawl back into this space she wanted me in was how that fetish was born.  And yes, why am I so fucking good at being a mommy domme, at working with clients who are adult babies?  Because I know it in every cell of my body.

But when I realise this, I also realise that this is the fuel that has filled my fear of men.  It is a fear of male sexual energy.  It is also a part of what fuelled the intensity of my dysphoria.  Not only was I “not all men” but I also apologized with my body, with my submission.

I won’t write about it today, because it merits its own posts, but this path brought me into the arms of men for the first time in an intimate way.  This is not to say that what I do with submissive men in my practice is not intimate, it’s just different.  This time, I met men in surrender.  I felt their energy, I responded to it, I made out with men, bit them and scratched them as I was swallowed by the dark hunger of the feminine.

Don’t worry, I’m still a dyke.  My kids tease me though.  That I ‘love dick’.  I don’t.  At least not yet.  I don’t even think I am bi.  And this is really weird because I used to have so many hangups about “gayness” as a teen male bodied person.  I do have hangups about gay men.  Displayed on this blog even.  That is a legacy of being sexually assaulted and touched and groped frequently from about the age of about 12 to 18.  Even if a child, a teen, can give consent, I did not.  But internalizing that it was my fault, or that I ‘wanted’ it and that’s why it happened, has affected me profoundly and shaped my current attitude towards men.

My therapist has me forming networks of 3:00 am friends.  This retreat has brought me closer to those who provided feedback.  And I also found horses again.

One morning, when I was overwhelmed, I went for a run.  A long slow run through the forest.  I cried when I knew I was completely out of earshot, completely alone.  I came to a field where there were three horses and stopped.  They looked up from the grass, their dew-bathed breakfast, ears perked.  I sat down and watched them and they watched me, and then I lay down, and they all came across the field and stood next to me, as close as the electric wire would allow.  I could feel their breath.  Hear them breathing, chewing, being.  They stayed with me for a long while.

When I cried, they ran off at a gallop to the far end of the field.  When I stopped, they came back, walking slowly, gingerly.

And then I went back into my silent retreat.  I’m still here.